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Welcome back to George vs the Listener Crossword, where 2011 is just flying by, and judging by comments on the Crossword Centre message board, all-corrects have been dropping like flies as well. At the rate I’m going, I’m due for an all-correct somewhere around 2014, I should book a ticket

Don’t know if anyone else has been having this problem, but WordPress seems to log me out regularly and I lose whatever it is I thought I was typing, so Im back in the bygone years of pre-autosave manually saving every sentence or two.

I ended up in a promo shoot for the Asheville Zombie walk last week – check me in my Riff Raff costume at about 25 seconds in

All this and a Listener! This week we’ve got Easy Win by Ilver, which appears to be a new setter or a newdonym, so hi Ilver, if you’re looking in. What have we got – eight DLM clues with an extra letter and eight unclued thematic entries around the outside, with one little change to make at the end. So it looks like the grid is real words, most clues are normal and we could be in for an easier one (good thing too, as this arrived when V was less than half finished).

The top row is thematic, so there’s no 1 across test, but a big boost on the 9 across test, where we have a gentle anagram HIATUS to get us going. That intersected with the recently-seen KIP,P, SAP,PED and the first DLM of A TERRE. Excellent start – it’s funny, even though the clues in a Listener are meant to be no harder (barring any tricks to clues), I solve daily crosswords by looking at all the acrosses then all the downs, when I’m doing a barred-grid puzzle I try to do it by regions of the grid.

I had skipped lunch, so my bar solving session to get this going could be extended a little longer. I was also having a bunch of fun with the clues – the DLM stood out to me, and I had INGPILAT fairly quickly, which with the AY at the end of two of the thematic entries, meant we were looking at some PIG LATIN, and the title is an anagram of WINESAY.

Is Pig Latin still around? I remember talking in it all the time in primary school in the 70s, and there’s a great little scene in “Top Secret” where someone gets the last rites read to him and it ends up in Pig Latin, but I don’t know if it’s one of those things that has disappeared.

After the frustration I got from my first bash at last week, this had me happier than the beer and food! I left the bar with about an 80% filled grid, a knowledge that something in pig latin was going around the outside, and I’d even figured out the title.

Had to wait until the next morning before I could get back to it though… By now it’s mostly the perimeter. UMP-AY, -CKSAY, EAT-AY -RDHAY. JUMP? MEAT? It doesn’t look like it’s going to be a phrase.

Let’s see what Chambers has for PIG LATIN… ahhhh, in the same page as PIG LATIN, there’s PIG JUMP, PIG LEAD, PIG HERD, PIG MEAT… the outside must be PIG words… PIGFISH, PIG LILY, PIGTAIL, PIGSICK.

Something to change… well ESSAY was sitting down there looking like a candidate for being a Pig Latin word, and just above it is PORC… SUS is a pig, so SUS becomes USSAY (wasn’t he one of Saddam’s kids?) and we have PORCUS – Latin for pig! Here’s my working grid, complete with BEER STAIN!

ESSAY becomes USSAY (from SYS) making PORCUS in the middle. I’m not good enough to do an animated one like over at LWO

A two-session solve, so I’m guessing this was on the easier side of things, but I really enjoyed the finds along the way.

Victory to George! 2011 tally: George 32, Listener 8. Current streak: George 6

Feel free to leave comments below, and check back next week when we have two little words with Danda.